The Khronos Group - a non-profit industry consortium to develop, publish and promote open standard, royalty-free media authoring and acceleration standards for desktop and handheld devices, combined with conformance qualification programs for platform and device interoperability.

Mar3rdThe Khronos Group announced the availability of technical previews of the new Vulkan™ open standard API for high-efficiency access to graphics and compute on modern GPUs used in a wide variety of devices. This ground-up design, previously referred to as the Next Generation OpenGL Initiative, provides applications direct control over GPU acceleration for maximized performance and predictability, and uses Khronos’ new SPIR-V™ specification for shading language flexibility. Vulkan initial specifications and implementations are expected later this year and any company may participate in Vulkan’s ongoing development by joining Khronos.

Mar3rdThe Khronos Group today announced the ratification and public release of the OpenCL 2.1 provisional specification. OpenCL 2.1 is a significant evolution of the open, royalty-free standard for heterogeneous parallel programming that defines a new kernel language based on a subset of C++ for significantly enhanced programmer productivity, and support for the new Khronos SPIR-V cross-API shader program intermediate language now used by both OpenCL and the new Vulkan graphics API. Read More

Mar3rdIn another significant announcement today, OpenCL 2.1 and Vulkan™, the new open standard API for high-efficiency access to graphics and compute on modern GPUs, are now sharing core intermediate language technologies resulting in SPIR-V; a revolution in the Khronos Standard Portable Intermediate Representation initially used by OpenCL™, now fully defined by Khronos with native support for shader and kernel features. SPIR-V splits the compiler chain, enabling high-level language front-ends to emit programs in a standardized intermediate form to be ingested by Vulkan or OpenCL drivers. Eliminating the need for a built-in high-level language source compiler significantly reduces driver complexity and will enable a diversity of language front-ends. Additionally, a standardized IR provides a measure of kernel IP protection, accelerated kernel load times and enables developers to use a common language front-end, improving kernel reliability and portability across multiple implementations. You can read more on the SPIR homepage, registry and whitepaper, and give us valuable community feedback in our SPIR forum. Read More

Mar3rdMozilla is introducing a preview of WebGL 2, which is still under development by the WebGL working group. WebGL 2 is based on OpenGL ES 3.0, and brings with it many improvements and additions to help developers create stunning visuals on the Web. WebGL 2 will raise many restrictions and add new capabilities compared to WebGL 1. For example, while WebGL 1 only required support for being able to render using 8 textures at a time, WebGL 2 raises this minimum limit to 32. Read More

Mar3rdImagination is a promoting member of the Khronos Group and has been working on developing a proof-of-concept driver for Vulkan for our PowerVR Rogue GPUs. Our PowerVR demo team has also spent the last two months porting one of our new OpenGL ES 3.0 demos to the new API and today we are able to show you a snapshot of our work. Vulkan™ is a next-generation, high-performance graphics and compute API developed by the Khronos Group. Previously known as glNext, Vulkan has been designed to address some of the shortcomings of the original OpenGL® API which was introduced 22 years ago. Read More

Mar2ndImagination Technologies announces a new area-optimized PowerVR GPU designed to drive high-quality graphics with full OpenGL ES 3.0 functionality into low-cost and space-constrained devices. The new PowerVR G6020 GPU has been specially designed for graphics efficiency in ultra-compact silicon area, obtaining better real device performance and compatibility without unnecessary overhead. It is the smallest member of the PowerVR Series6XE family, with four arithmetic logic unit (ALU) cores and a silicon footprint of 2.2mm2 (28nm process technology at 400MHz). Read More

Feb24thAltera Corporation announced Microsoft is using Altera Arria 10 FPGAs to achieve compelling performance-per-Watt in data center acceleration based on CNN (convolutional neural network) algorithms. This performance is achieved using the open software development language known as OpenCL, or VHDL to code the Arria 10 FPGA and its IEEE754 hard floating point DSP (digital signal processing) blocks. Read More